Beth Terry writes Some of my best friends are plastic bags! Many people consider plastic bags to
be evil and have discarded them in favor of reusable totes. Which is fine. But
this article is about saving old plastic grocery bags and reusing them in place
of things for which we'd otherwise have to buy new plastic. It emphasizes
Re-use before Re-cycling.

Aaron Newton submitted The
4 Day Work Week
The clear fact that a 4 day work week would save such a precious
non-renewable resource is just the first of 16 reasons why I think it's
time to revive the idea of reducing the numbers of days we work each
week.

Amanda Hanley writes on 7 ways to reduce your exposure to PBDE flame retardants. PBDEs are everywhere, and there's some evidence connecting them to brain
and developmental problems in animals and possibly even cancer. Exposure to
flame retardant chemicals is ubiquitous, but there are things you can do to keep
the concentration of PBDEs in your body as low as possible.

September 18, 2006

Typepad appears to have a limit on the size of posts which I ran up against with the first Carnival of the Green post, so I'm adding the remaining posts here. My apologies for not being able to squeeze everyone into the first post.

Welcome to the 45th Carnival of the Green - your weekly digest of posts from the green blogosphere! This week's installment is brought to you by the peeps City Hippy and Karavans.

So without much further ado, let's get started. Preston Koerner over at the Jetson Green Blog tells us about the upcoming solar energy homes tour: "To kick off October as National Energy Awareness month, the American Solar Energy Society is sponsoring a national solar tour of homes. There is a tour in most states on October 7, 2006. This should be a great opportunity for home owners and prospective home builders, to see real world examples of alternative energy integration as sustainable building."

I'll be taking the local tour as solar power is really big in my neck of the woods.

Jacob Tennessen has an interesting article on he's managed to avoid owning a car for ten years now, and why we should all strive to do the same.My Carless Decade.

Carl Feagans over at the Hot Cup of Joe blog writes about Pseudo-Skepticism and Pseudo-Journalism on Global Warming. In Carl's own words, "This is a look at the practice of pseudo-skepticism and pseudo-journalism with regard to global warming initiated by an email exchange I had with a right-wing columnist. I offer commentary and excerpts of the emails we exchanged, as well as some decent sources of information for those wanting to reference the scientific consensus on global warming."

Aaron Nuline, of the PoweringDown Blog, writes about one of my main concerns these days: Peak Oil. Aaron says, "Endless discussion of peak oil statistics isn't of much interest to me. Nor is sitting around trying to guess the exact date of the arrival of the peak. The response of our communities to this coming era of human history, now that blows my hair back. I believe a return to mixed-use, walkable communities will go a long way towards reducing the amount of energy we need. It will also make it possible for us to leave the volatile Middle East, drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses we emit into the atmosphere and get our overweight population out walking and talking again." Right on, Aaron.

Being an entrepreneur, I find this blog article by Jenni Lukac at Triple Punditabout what it takes to make it to the "top" in business ethically very relevant. Thanks to Nick Aster for the heads up on this one.

Enrique at Commonground posts, "the discovery of new oil fields really isn't cause for celebration. Even as companies ramp up to extract oil from the Gulf of Mexico, so does the race for fossil fuels escalate as China, India and developing nations chase a finite resource." Thanks to ejgili for this pointing this one out. (From now on, everytime you hear about some allegedly "big" oil discovery, just divide its estimated size in barrels by the daily global oil consumption rate of 84 million barrels to see how insiginificant it is.)

Rich, aka Disillusioned Kid, has a couple of good ones for as well. First he points us to one of my favorite bloggers, Jason Godesky of Anthropik, who writes about the "ecological concept of 'overshoot', how it applies to the oil economy and what this tells us about peak oil." Then he points to another fascinating piece on why some people are so irrationally terrified of anyone who accepts Global Warming as a bona fide threat to us all. The post is Seeing the Green Scare as a Cultural or Religious War at GreenistheNewRed.com. It never ceases to amaze me how in some circles people won't even accept GW as a long shot threat let alone an imminent one.

Tracy sends a link to what looks like a good introduction by Simon Sharp to our renewable energy options over at Eco Street.

Since you've probably worked up an appetite by now, we'll switch to food topics for a bit. Elisa at Hip and Zen Pen is having an informative discussion on going from vegetarianism to veganism: Help Veggie Go Vegan.

Moving right along, Elsa from the Greener Side blog tells us about the fearless environmental reporters who dig up the dirt on environmental problems in her piece titled Chew on Green, Gritty Reporting.

Don Bosch, aka The Evangelical Ecologist, describes his Five Years and a Day post thusly, "I have a post up this week at The Evangelical Ecologist recounting my 9/11 experience while I was managing Navy environmental programs in Japan. Perhaps there is a link between success in the battle against terrorism and success in the environmental arena?"